She was rifling through the garbage in one of the last run-down streets on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, wearing a ragged crop top and bruises: heroin chic, but without the chic. We let Greg Kooser do the talking. “Are you Trixypop?” he said.
“Are you pigs?” she snarled back. “How many times do I got to talk to you about this?”
We were not in fact police officers. Mr Kooser, 47, works in marketing for a chain of boutique hotels. Our squad of investigators included a nurse, a therapist and a lady who teaches at a private school on the upper west side.
We were the audience for an interactive play, The Lombardi Case.
Writer and director Carlo D’Amore said he was seeking to cater to the nostalgia of middle class professionals, who live in a pristine city but yearn to experience New York as it was in the 1970s. “Who doesn’t want to talk to a drag queen?” he said.
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There is actually a club in the East Village that serves precisely this desire, but Mr D’Amore’s play also offers junkies and vagrants and lonely cops who just want to clean up the town. “I based it on a bunch of actual cases,” he said. It is staged outside on the same streets, now lined with wine bars and hipsters and well-dressed women from the Upper West Side queuing to have brunch.
Divided into investigative teams and briefed by a character called Chief Patrick Miller, the audience go out to find and interrogate “witnesses” and attempt to solve the case of Christina Lombardi, the daughter of a US senator found dead in a burned out squat.
Yet on the Lower East Side, it is not always clear who is a character from the 1970s and who is not. Initially, one of Mr D’Amore’s characters was nearly arrested. “The police thought Vinnie the Mouth was soliciting,” he said. On Sunday a bus load of tourists seemed to form the same opinion and stopped to take pictures.
Nancy Corbo, 37, a RADA-trained actress who plays Trixipop the Junkie, is often mistaken for an actual junkie and offered help. “Three women came up to me today and said: “Are you O?’,” she said afterwards.
We were often confused too. Tanzeena Huq, 32, who works in finance, quizzed numerous baffled members of the public. At some point she even tried to interrogate me.
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“But I’m a cop!” I said. We all got a little carried away by our respective parts. When Trixiepop suggested that I accompany her behind a scaffold, I told her to knock it off, because I was on duty.
Chief Miller told us not to touch any of the witnesses — a warning Mr D’Amore included after one audience member, a Japanese tour guide, put a character in a headlock.
Yet before long, Mr Kooser, a mild and courteous man, was physically restraining Vinnie the Mouth. “Greg! What are you doing?” we shouted, but Greg was already fully in character.
“We better get back to base soon,” he said. “Else the chief’s going to rip us a new asshole.” Back at HQ, the relentless Ms Huq accused Chief Miller of committing the murder himself.
“Go back to grade school, sweetheart,” he said, prompting peels of laughter from Ms Huq’s friends.